Knopf, 536 pages

Review by Ralph White

For anyone interested in the world of mid-Nineteenth-Century India, this is a wonderful book. William Dalrymple has established himself as one of the most original and compelling authors writing today about the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East. His capacity to paint graphic word pictures of lost worlds, his masterly storytelling abilities and scholarship, and his clear sympathy for the Sufi culture of the late Mughal Dynasty all make his work compulsively readable.

This book tells the poignant tale of the last Mughal emperor of India in the days leading up to the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Independence, as the Indians call it). Today we often think of Delhi as an overcrowded, impoverished city weighed down by the stresses of modern life. But in the mid-Nineteenth Century it was a beautiful and elegant city whose heart was the Red Fort where many nights the Emperor would host salons of Sufi poetry in a court perfumed by rose water, illuminated by Chinese lanterns, and filled with the finest poets in the land. The most accomplished among them were exponents of the ghazal, the poetic form popularized recently in America by Robert Bly, which requires the disciplined expression of mystical insight in a few short lines. This court of love, as it has been described, was also populated by courtesans in whom the tantric and Sufi worlds met in poetic and erotic ecstasy. But these were not ordinary courtesans — some were accomplished and published poets and one even married the Emperor.

Dalrymple’s writing beautifully evokes the spiritual and artistic life of the city on the eve of the Mutiny in 1857. He portrays a happily syncretic culture where yogis, sadhus and ascetics met each evening with Sufis on the banks of the river to share their meditative practices. Yet looming over this inspiring scene is the prospect of war and terror. The British had grown increasingly aggressive militarily, and this had been accompanied by the rise of an evangelizing, self-righteous Victorian Christianity that lacked the love of Indian culture and dress that had characterized many Eighteenth Century British expatriates, many of whom married Indian women, smoked hookahs and dressed like Indian nabobs.

This growing insensitivity to the local culture made possible the introduction of cartridges greased with pork or beef fat among the sepoys of the East India Company’s armies. Of course, this inflamed both Muslim and Hindu soldiers and set the stage for the largest revolt of the Nineteenth Century against an imperial power — one that ended in catastrophe and horror. British military power allied with missionary zeal unwittingly ignited the powers of religious fundamentalism and extremism and ultimately wound up seeding the narrow, Deobandi form of wahhabi-like Islam in India. Dalrymple is acute in his perception of parallels between those times and ours.” One hundred and forty years later it was out of Deoband madrassas that the Taliban emerged to create the most retrograde Islamic regime in modern history,” he notes. In fact, one concludes this book with a powerful sense of the tragic loss of a marvelous time and culture, and with a sense of warning that unless we can muster a profound respect for Islamic and Asian civilizations today we may be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the Victorian imperialists. This is a gripping book that tells a rich, largely unknown story — one with a moral that we would do well to heed. It is highly recommended.

The Last Mughal can be ordered at:
www.randomhouse.com/knopf

Mitch Horowitz is an editor and publisher of many years' experience with a lifelong interest in man's search for meaning. The executive editor of Tarcher/Penguin in New York, he has published some of today's leading titles in world religion, esoterica, and the metaphysical. To learn more about The Secret Teachings of All Ages and other books, please visit his website at www.mitchhorowitz.com.

In the past century, religion and academia have been on uneasy terms – to put it mildly. The philosopher Jacob Needleman once wryly noted that when he was coming up through university, one could study myth, religion, and symbol — but "any possibility that the ideas in religion were true was brushed aside."

Even one of the 20th century's most influential studies of symbolist religions and tradition, The Golden Bough, disparaged the meaning of its own subject matter: "In short, magic is a spurious system of natural law as well as a fallacious guide of conduct; it is a false science as well as an abortive art."

It was in this atmosphere that a young investment banker named Manly P. Hall made a startling departure from the traditional scholarship of his day. In 1928 – at the unthinkably young age of 28 – Hall self-published one of the most reverent and thorough works ever to catalogue the esoteric wisdom of antiquity: The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Hall's Secret Teachings became a one-of-a-kind codex to the ancient occult and esoteric traditions of the world. Its hundreds of entries shone a rare light on some of the most fascinating and closely held aspects of myth, religion, and philosophy. Seventy-five years after its initial publication, the book's range of material remains astounding: Pythagorean mathematics; alchemical formulae; Hermetic doctrine, the workings of the Kabala; the geometry of Ancient Egypt; the Native American myths; the uses of cryptograms; an analysis of the Tarot; the symbols of Rosacrucianism; the esotericism of the Shakespearean dramas – these are just a few of Hall's topics.

Hall wrote in an era immediately preceding the Great Depression. He described the "outstanding event" of his Wall Street career as "witnessing a man depressed over investment losses take his life." One could imagine the young Hall worrying whether the fading Gilded Age-frenzy that gripped our culture would spell ultimate decline for our fluency in myth, symbol, and the love of learning that characterized the voices and figures who populate his volume. Where, the young man wondered, were we headed?

"With very few exceptions," he wrote, "modern authorities downgraded all systems of idealistic philosophy and the deeper aspects of comparative religion. Translations of classical authors could differ greatly, but in most cases the noblest thoughts were eliminated or denigrated…and scholarship was based largely upon the acceptance of a sterile materialism."

To signal how his approach would differ from the prevailing mood, Hall quoted his philosophic hero, Francis Bacon, early in the book: "A little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."

A Classic, Old and New

In 1934, Hall founded the Philosophical Research Society (www.prs.org) in Los Angeles, which has published sumptuous, coffee-table sized editions of his volume ever since. But many readers have also found the book expensive, sometimes cumbersome in size, and often difficult to read on account of small typefaces and occasionally arcane fonts and page design. In an historic first in spiritual publishing, my colleagues and I at Tarcher/Penguin (where I am executive editor) have partnered with PRS to produce a new "Reader's Edition" of The Secret Teachings of All Ages. Available in Fall 2003, this reset, reformatted, compact-sized, and affordably priced trade paperback makes the Secret Teachings available to a large general audience for the first time.

Packaging a new edition of the Secret Teachings is like trying to sculpt a rare and precious stone – one serious slip, and its splendor and luminescence are lost. What are the demands of preparing the first mass edition of a work that has previously been the closely held – if deeply influential – treasure of a relative handful among the reading public?

Back to the Reading Room

While the Canadian-born Hall lived and worked in Los Angeles for much of his adult life, he actually toiled over the Secret Teachings in perhaps the greatest citadel to public education our nation has: The beaux-arts Reading Room of the New York Public Library. Entering this magnificent, cavernous space today, it is not difficult to picture the large-framed, young Manly P. Hall surrounded by books of myth and symbol at one of the room's huge oaken tables. Like a monk of the middle ages, Hall copiously, almost superhumanly, pored over hundreds of the great works of antiquity, distilling their esoteric lore into his volume. The scale of his bibliography is extraordinary. Its nearly 1,000 entries range from the core works of Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, to translations of the Gnostic, Nicene, and Hermetic literature, to the writings of Paracelsus, Ptolmey, Bacon, Basil Valentine, and Cornelius Argippa, to works of every variety on the ancient and esoteric philosophies – religious, mythic, or metaphysical – that have expressed themselves in symbol or ceremony.

In creating his record of the ancient mysteries, Hall also meticulously selected drawings – more than 200 of them – illustrating the meaning and ideas embedded within man's oldest symbols and figures. He worked closely with artist J. Augustus Knapp who created an additional 54 color paintings boldly recreating scenes from the past whose shape we can only speculate upon at the outer reaches of our learning. To publish the new, reader-friendly version of the Secret Teachings that we had in mind, it would be necessary to abridge Hall's selected illustrations. Could this be done without detracting from the book's majesty?

This task was too important to be performed without the greatest intimacy with the text. In what seemed akin to reading the Encyclopedia Britannica of the esoteric, I returned to Hall's old haunt: the cathedral-sized Reading Room of the New York Public Library and, seated day upon day in one its hundreds of wooden chairs, pored over every word, caption, index note, and bibliographic entry in the great work. Which illustrations were imperative and which could be sacrificed? The key was to retain those illustrations – eventually about 125 in all – that worked in concert with – and, hence, were necessary to understanding – the ideas in the text. Making these choices was slightly eased by the knowledge that PRS would continue to publish its own complete edition of the Secret Teachings, so that no visual matter would be lost to time.

Above all, however, I set forth the principle that we would not abridge the narrative itself. The full text of the Secret Teachings appears in the "Reader's Edition" – including Hall's original – and extraordinarily detailed – index and bibliography. All that is missing is one of several short prefaces, which remains available in the PRS edition.

Bringing the Mountain to Mohammad

Perhaps the greatest of challenges was how to reset and reformat the text itself. The original edition is composed of varying columns, captions, and inset text – sometimes as jarring to the Western eye as a page of Babylonian Talmud. In its original trim size, the book's dimensions are usually large: 12 x 18 inches. It has color plates, foldouts, and an overlay. The small size of its text is sometimes a strain on the eye. Our "Reader's Edition" demanded a typestyle, format, and layout that was, well, readable – yet loyal to the vibration of the original work. This would be no simple task: Until today, none of Hall's 1928 text has been available electronically; PRS, in its many reprints over the years, has used the original plates on which the book is based. In the information age, we are all-too-accustomed to text that can be easily manipulated. The Secret Teachings would give itself over with no such ease.

At expenses that ran into many thousands of dollars, we delivered an edition of the book to NK Graphics in New Hampshire, which was capable of scanning text. The book, however, was too large for their scanner beds, requiring the material at the bottom of its pages to be hand-typed. Then the scanned data was submitted to a computer program that – imperfectly – recognizes the symbols of letters and transforms the material into a new manuscript. Alas, such methods are never quite as advanced as we believe them to be, and a professional proofreader had to read the entire text of the Secret Teachings against the scanned material to ensure accuracy. Nor could the scanning technology pick up the many Greek and Hebrew characters spread throughout the book; this required us to insert each such character as an original piece of art.

In April 2003, an entirely new manuscript of more than 1,100 pages landed on my desk in a pile about 8-inches high – as though it had newly rolled off of Hall's Edwardian-era typewriter. It was rather shocking to look at a fresh manuscript of a book that has stood largely unaltered for a lifetime. The task, however, was not to do something new with it – it was to keep something new from being done. We had to reset, reformat, and redesign the text so that it could be published in a standard size, at a standard price – but without "correcting" it. I implored our excellent copyediting and production staff to treat this like an ancient papyrus – arcane spellings, references, and language was to be left absolutely untouched. (For instance, Hall spells Shakespeare as "Shakspere," following the only known signatures in the Bard's own hand.) More than a few times I had to intercede to keep modern forms and styles of usage from disrupting the earlier perfection of Hall's work.

Meanwhile, our design staff set about crafting a page design that would echo the hallowed feel of the original, while framing the text and illustrations within the trim size of a slightly larger-than-normal trade paperback. The words of this article cannot fully capture their success. My colleagues created a page design of classic beauty – one that set the columns in an imposing but inviting way, and that allowed ample space for the crucial illustrations to breathe, yet to be sized in such a manner that the book would be newly wieldy and manageable. When I saw how the text would appear on the printed page, I knew we were very close to success.

An eleventh-hour challenge emerged concerning Hall's extensive index – itself a document of more than 6,700 entries. While we had assumed that a computerized word-search program would be sufficient to recalibrate Hall's index to the newly numbered pages, again we discovered the Secret Teachings would not give itself over so easily. In a feature of the book that astounded the professional typesetters, proofreaders, and indexers working on the volume, they discovered that Hall had not necessarily organized his index by terms alone, but often by concept. Hence, the word "sun" in the index might correspond to the term "orb of the day" in the text. So, the indexer herself had to become fully versed in the narrative before the newly formatted index could be complete.

There were other considerations: The original edition uses Roman numerals throughout for page numbers. Also, the chapters themselves were unnumbered. We decided to use easier-to-follow Arabic, or contemporary, numerals to number the pages, while the chapters are newly numbered according to Roman style.

These and other measures drew us closer to publication. Our publisher, Joel Fotinos – perhaps the most spiritually committed executive in publishing today – worked heroically to hold our price down, so that the "Reader's Edition" could be widely available. Obadiah Harris, the scholarly president of PRS today, pitched in to help, as well – and, with meticulous budgeting and cooperation on royalty rates and other matters, we managed to take a book that had been priced at $54.95 in its least-expensive edition, and make it available at $24.95. This, it seemed, was the final step we needed to make this new edition a reality.

A Work Enduring, A Work Reborn

Readers who discover The Secret Teachings of All Ages for the first time today will encounter a book probably unlike any they have seen before. The accomplishment of the Secret Teachings, in part, is this: It may be the only such compendium of the last several hundred years that takes the world of myth and symbol on its own terms.

Books such as The Golden Bough viewed the ancient past as we would look at items in a museum: interesting and worthy of study, even important, but never broaching the idea that things we read about in the annals of antiquity could be true for us today – true, if not in fact, than, more importantly, in what they whisper about the workings of the cosmos and man's place within it.

We read Thucydides today and marvel at the Greeks' gifts for oration, strategy, historiography, and at the drama of human events that marked the ancient world. How easy it is, though, to simply breeze past those passages in which great statesmen traveled to Delphi to consult the oracle. Contemporary readers rarely pause to notice such events – nor are they encouraged to – as if such episodes can be understood simply as interludes between the true lessons of the work.

For Manly Hall, however, there was no such casual bypassing. One can read his masterly twelfth chapter, "Wonders of Antiquity," and learn something about what was experienced – at least so far as we can venture – in the consultation of an oracle. Hall realized, perhaps more deeply than any other scholar of his time, that the ancients possessed extraordinary powers of observation – ways of understanding the correspondences between the outer natural world and man's inner state – that were equally potent, and equally worthy of study, as their gifts for calendars, architecture, reason, and agriculture.

Hall would observe the workings of esoteric cultures with the same passion and awe that one finds in historians who were a living part of the history they wrote about. In the darkening night of the decayed Mayan empire, the late-18th century Mayan historian known as Chilam Balam of Chumayel, looked at the culture that had very nearly slipped away – at its calendars, its mathematical skills, its astrology, and lamented:

"They knew how to count time,
Even within themselves.
The moon, the wind, the year, the day,
They all move, but also pass on.
All blood reaches its place of rest,
As all power reaches its throne…"

This, in a sense, is the universal voice that finds its way into each century to tell of the wonders of the past. It found its way to the 20th – and now the 21st – century through Manly P. Hall. His is the voice that runs like a luminescent thread through history telling the stories of those who have passed, not as a distant judge, but as a lover of the knowledge embodied in the ancient ways.

* * *

Sources Quoted in this Article:

The Golden Bough by James Frazer; Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics; 1999; original abridgement published 1922.

The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Reader's Edition by Manly P. Hall; Tarcher/Penguin; 2003; Philosophical Research Society; 1928.

The Maya World by Demetrio Sodi Morales; Minutiae Mexicano; 1976.

Jacob Needleman, lecture, Atlantic University, May 31st, 2002.

* * *

Ptolemy Tompkins is the author of This Tree Grows Out of Hell, Paradise Fever, and The Beaten Path. He lives in New York City.

An Endless Trace: The Passionate Pursuit of Wisdom in the West by Christopher Bamford, Codhill Press, 2003

For over two decades, through the titles he has edited, introduced, and worked invisibly on for Lindisfarne Press and Anthroposophic Press (now SteinerBooks), Christopher Bamford has labored in the service of the esoteric wisdom traditions of the West with an energy, intelligence, and devotion largely without equal. Owen Barfield, Nicholas Berdyaev, Vladimir Soloviev, O. V. de L. Milosz, Georg Kuhlewind – the list of authors Bamford has worked to keep in print in English comprises some of the most brilliant, if often also the most neglected, of 20th-century spiritual thinkers.

One result of all this editing and introduction writing has been a scarcity of full-length books by Bamford himself. Up until now, The Voice of the Eagle, a meditation on Eriugena's commentary on the prologue to the Gospel of John (recently re-released by Lindisfarne in an enlarged edition), has been the only title available to readers looking for a more complete statement of the philosophy elaborated in his countless commentaries and introductions. In An Endless Trace, that larger statement is available at last.

The main object of Bamford's labors, and of his extraordinarily wide reading, could be summed up in one word: Sophia. The Greek word for wisdom, Sophia is, for Bamford, also something considerably larger: it is a living reality. "No civilization in recorded history," he writes, "has been as clever, as intelligent as our own. We are drowning in the products of intelligence in the form of information and ever more sophisticated technological applications of it. But? we are beginning to realize that wisdom is something else, a quality of being we must have in order in order to survive and continue to evolve as human beings. We are recognizing that to be human, which, as all the sacred texts teach, is the most blessed seed state, has to do with qualities, virtues, that we have ignored, cast away, and despised? Now we seek it again, wherever we can find it."

An Endless Trace goes in search of those virtues and qualities, charting a rambling course through the entire history of Western thought, from Pythagoras and Plato to Novalis, Goethe, and Heidegger. From a number of perspectives — historical, philosophical, literary, personal — Bamford attacks the question of how one might go about living a life in accord with the idea – central to all the traditions he champions — that the human person is a microcosm of an ever-evolving, multi-leveled universe. A universe in which consciousness is not an anomaly but the most essential and definitive of all its characteristics.

"It is, of course," he writes, "a fantastic idea that all creation, all nature, is human nature; that human nature is the only 'nature' there is. To be understood it must be lived. At the same time, potentially, we are more than nature, for, as Sophia, it is we who must mediate between what is created and what is uncreated.

"We may call this view 'spiritual anthropomorphism.' Ancient humanity dimly intuited it. Remnants of it remain in so-called primitive animism. It explains at once humanity's profound grief over the fall and the understanding that, just as humanity had lost its original state so, too, the world now embodied wisdom only in signs and symbols, and that even these were confused. ? The writers of the Wisdom books understood that Sophia, who had dwelt with God? had lived with humanity and been rejected? They understood, too, that she was approaching once again."

Bamford's book offers a thrillingly eclectic journey through worlds of thought that deal consistently with spiritual realities rather than mere concepts. We live in an age when, to say the least, it is no longer fashionable to treat ideas as living, breathing entities – beings in and of themselves which demand respect and commitment in order to be truly understood. Bamford goes ahead and does it anyhow, and it is this which gives his work so much of its profound importance. Whether unpacking the wisdom of an ancient voice like Pythagoras or Heraclitus, or more contemporary visionary voices like Henry Corbin or Schwaller de Lubicz, the message at work in Bamford's book is that the Western intellectual tradition has always been informed and enlivened – sometimes secretly, at others more openly – by this ability to frame philosophy in terms of living spiritual realities. These styles of seeing the world and the human person's place within it are as valid today as they ever were in the past, Bamford argues, and potentially hold much of value for those modern wisdom seekers who for decades have been spending so much of their time exclusively with Far Eastern traditions.

Though the words "Christian" and "Christianity" are conspicuously absent from both the book's title and subtitle, An Endless Trace is profoundly, if not always conventionally, Christian in its perspective. "Christianity," Bamford writes, "justifiably has a bad name. Much that is horrible and inexcusable has been committed in its name. But the Christianity I am talking about here is larger, indeed quite different, from the religion we have been taught."

Different how, exactly? Chiefly in the attention that it pays to what the Anthroposophist Owen Barfield called the evolution of consciousness – the notion that human consciousness and human perception do not stay the same over time but instead change radically from age to age — and to the attention it gives to the place of Christ's birth within that evolution. "Generalizing," writes Bamford, "one may say that before the Incarnation – before the Godhead entered bodily into the world – worship, devotion, walking the way of the gods, was an activity directed outward. The gods were other, and lived in a real apart? The mystic, the shaman, the priest had to leave this world, leave behind their bodies and their earthly members, and 'travel' to the other world which was wisdom, beauty, truth, light. Since the Incarnation, the divine – the gods – are nowhere else but here. Walking a spiritual path no longer means going anywhere else. The task is now to render the divine present in this earthly life. It even means building it."

Because it is put together in significant part from previously published articles and introductions that sought to convey a lot of information in a short amount of space, Bamford's book is dense with names and allusions – sometimes overwhelmingly so. Bamford can also go from being overly dense to curiously fluffy in the space of a sentence or two. When he tells us, for example, that the medieval Troubadours "gave expression to a unique view of the world at once visionary, initiatory, and nondualistically grounded in the quintessentially here-and-now," he isn't really telling us much of anything. At his best, however, Bamford gives us a truly brilliant series of hints of what a modern spirituality that does justice both to the lessons of tradition and the discoveries that, ever since the sixteenth century, presumably eclipsed those lessons, might look like. Bamford's is a philosophy that seeks to revalorize the old Christian view of the human person within a cosmic perspective that embraces the truths uncovered by science rather than running from them. It's a task that both Goethe and Rudolf Steiner, two of Bamford's heroes, would have endorsed thoroughly. The only real mystery is why so few people, in a world where far less compelling spiritual syntheses sell like hotcakes, still know about it.

An Endless Trace can be ordered by calling Steinerbooks toll-free at
1-800-856-8664.

Mark Hawthorne is a California-based writer specializing in Asian philosophical and religious traditions.

Arouding the Goddess: Sex and Love in the Buddhist Ruins of India by Tim Ward, Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2003.

What a fickle travel companion fate can be. One day you’re deep in the Himalayas of Buddhist Ladakh, absorbed in the Four Noble Truths and the arduous process of banishing desire, and suddenly fate delivers you to New Delhi, face to face with a woman who inspires new levels of fantasy and challenges your entire belief system. But then, you ask, isn’t there room for both spirituality and sexual passion within the same person? This is the riddle author Tim Ward skillfully addresses in Arousing the Goddess, the third book in what has now become his ‘nirvana trilogy.’

Inspired by the Buddha’s advice not to believe his words, but to put them to the test, philosophy graduate Ward left the comforts of his native Canada to travel through Asia in the 1980s. His six-year sojourn took him through remote ashrams and monasteries in India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Thailand, Indonesia, China and Tibet, giving him plenty of opportunity to examine the truth in the Buddha’s teachings. Ward is a pioneer in the nascent genre of spiritual journalism, which explores the frontiers of philosophy and mysticism through the lens of the author’s own experience. While his earlier books, What the Buddha Never Taught and The Great Dragon’s Fleas, focus on the Theravada and Mahayana schools of Buddhism, tantra is the thread pulled through Arousing the Goddess as Ward explores both his intense physical and emotional sensations and the various facets of a practice with roots in both Buddhism and Hinduism. Indeed, ‘tantra’ comes from the weaving trade and signifies texts spun out and woven together. Today we know it as a highly ritualistic practice in which the physical and spiritual worlds affect each other. Tantric practitioners often revere the body as a temple and indulge its most sensual impulses. But Arousing the Goddess is no dispassionate description of psychophysical phenomena; it’s a subjective and brutally honest account of a mystical experience induced during tantric sex and how it represents the union of the soul with the Goddess.

Fresh off the dharma trail in India, his soul filled with monastic attitudes, Ward meets and is quickly traveling with Sabina, an alluring Austrian Indologist working on her thesis, for which she must record every statue in India that displays the Buddha-touching-the-Earth motif. This is a seated Buddha with the fingertips of his right hand gently touching the ground and signifies the moment of the Buddha’s enlightenment. As Sabina explains, after the Buddha’s enlightenment under the Bodhi Tree, Mara, the Great Tempter of Buddhism, challenges him by sending his three beautiful daughters to seduce him. But the Buddha recognizes Mara’s trickery and turns the daughters into hags. Now angry and desperate, Mara says no one will understand the Buddha’s enlightenment, since there is no one to witness his great achievement. In reply, the Buddha calls the Earth herself to witness by touching the ground; an Earth Goddess appears from beneath the Buddha’s hand and Mara is defeated once again. Ward and Sabina fall in love, and the Earth-touching gesture of the Buddha becomes a metaphor for the awakening wisdom Ward experiences as he and Sabina enjoy what he soon realizes must be tantric sex. Indeed, one of Ward’s most insightful musings is that in touching the Earth, Buddha is in fact connecting with the ultimate feminine power, and the author posits there is a goddess at the very heart of Buddhism itself — an interesting revelation in light of Buddhism’s patriarchal cosmology. Ward sees that the Earth Goddess was real, while Mara’s daughters were an illusion. Since the Buddha felt compelled to respond to Mara’s challenge, he wisely acknowledges, perhaps there is some deeper truth about sex.

And a deeper truth about sex is what lurks in the heart of Arousing the Goddess. Ward admits he’s looking to satisfy his physical urges, as Sabina seems to be just beyond his grasp, her golden hair a flame to a hundred eager moths. “Sabina was certainly a master in the arts of love,” he writes, “but I wondered if I and all men were for her just canvases on which she expressed her art.” Complicating matters is the conflict Ward must deal with as this Buddhist acolyte is torn between monastic denial and erotic ecstasy — struggling to find solace in detachment while his libido is rocked to the core. Ironically, his time in monasteries and the frankness with which he reveals himself seem to have conspired to prepare him for a sexual experience that transcends the physical and becomes spiritual — a rarefied sexual style and mystical union that most tantric practitioners discover only with the guidance of a qualified guru. He does not describe tantric sex as physically enjoyable, however, characterizing the couplings as more pain than pleasure: “My head, hands, feet and belly felt on fire, the nerves incredibly sensitive to touch. The rush was weirdly ecstatic, electrifying, almost unbearable in its intensity. My body shuddered like paper before it ignites.” Energy, not orgasm, is the key as Ward searches for the meaning behind experiences that, generated spontaneously, leave him confused and yearning for more.

Ward’s prose is vivid, drawing the reader into an exotic landscape of temples and bedchambers as he and Sabina explore India’s museums and each other. We’re not used to reading such intimate details from a man, but it quickly becomes clear we are witnessing a reversal in how we expect men and women to behave. While Sabina is tough and aggressive, Ward is sensitive and nurturing; on a number of occasions, for example, he delights in carefully preparing a hotel room with candles and fresh fruit, waiting for Sabina to return: “Sabina’s eyes slowly surveyed the room. She smiled at the sight of the pomegranate, guava and red bananas I had piled in a bowl in the center of the wide blue bed. On one of the night tables the small white elephant she had given me raised its trunk playfully. I lit four candles around the bed, then turned off the light. Bicycle bells rang in the street below. A burst of firecrackers popped dully in the distance, and the occasional Roman candle sent bars of light in through the cracks in the shutters.

“‘This is our room,’ I said, glad for how she lingered over the small
details I had prepared.”

The author faces personal demons with confessional honesty, which ultimately aids his awakening, yet this is in stark contrast to Sabina’s enigmatic behavior. Although she claims to be annoyed by all the attention she receives from men, Sabina apparently has no compunction in using her charms to further her research. She is equally adept at disengaging herself emotionally, especially after sex — a trait that disappoints Ward as well. True, with her appreciation of other cultures, strong spirit and admirable facility with Hindi, Sabina makes a desirable partner with whom to experience India, but we only get a glimpse of her capacity for genuine intimacy. She often seems as illusory as Mara’s daughters, rather than the goddess Ward sees.

Ward’s portrait of India makes for fascinating reading, and he is at his best describing the everyday aspects of the subcontinent: ablutions in the Ganges, colorful religious festivals and negotiating the seething cacophony of what is at once one of the world’s most dazzling and unsavory lands. This book could serve as a valuable primer — or warning — for anyone embarking on a trip to Asia. He offers enough historical details (including some fascinating background on the goddess Kali) to give richness to the narrative, and his ear for dialogue and talent for engaging all the senses bring the reader into every scene. Ward’s tale inhabits a world we do not often see, but it leaves us encouraged about the potential for spiritual development. Part travelogue, part memoir, part odyssey, Arousing the Goddess is thoroughly engrossing as it unearths gems from surprising terrain, nudging us on the path to our own self-discovery.

Joanna Meyer is a freelance writer living in New York City.

Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche by Bill Plotkin.

Paperback: 320 pages; New World Library; 368 pages; $15.95

It would be a pity if this book’s audience were restricted to the converted, since Soulcraft, a rich digest of Plotkin’s years of experience as a psychologist and wilderness guide, is a Baedeker to self-discovery. Yet, it’s a subject that invites resistance. Not without reason is the compressed language of poetry favored for conveying the unsayable, the considerable challenge Bill Plotkin sets himself. As William Carlos Williams so famously wrote: It is difficult to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there. In his engagement with the ineffable, Plotkin superbly supports his own wise words with quotations from Rilke, T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, W.H. Auden, and other poets. One might say that Soulcraft is an extended gloss on Rumi’s springtime musing:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the

doorsill where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

Plotkin’s aim is to lead us to the doorsill of the two worlds, on an underworld exploration – “not a nature walk, not an Outward Bound journey” – but a journey into “the mysteries of our individual lives, to find our unique way of belonging to this world, to recover the never-before-seen treasure, [what one might equally call the essence, or seed of quiescent potential] we are born to bring to our communities.” As Plotkin capably elucidates, “Our personal destiny is to become that treasure through our actions.” The purpose of our journey is – as expressed in Mary Oliver’s poem of the same name – to discover who we truly are, “to save the only life [we can] save.”

The Soulcraft journey Plotkin details is familiar to many; it is the journey of Odysseus, Aeneas, Psyche, Dante, Job. The list is legion, and the impediments and vicissitudes of such a voyage are, as Plotkin well knows, manifold. Not the least of which is getting started.

“Many people fill their days with a thousand and one distractions in an attempt to muffle the cry of their own souls,” is the core of Plotkin’s argument. Drawing on anthropology, theology, philosophy, depth psychology, and eco psychology (a synthesis of ecology and psychotherapy), he elaborates a series of focused actions to address both the causes and consequences of our Western malaise. Since, as Plotkin believes, “The rarity of finding sacred work is at the root of our Western despair and sorrow,” the first step for many is to recognize that we are cut off from ourselves. Like Dante we are in the middle of a dark wood, the true path lost. Being stuck, paralyzed or, as Plotkin imaginatively puts it, unnecessarily defended by the Loyal Soldier, is not uncommon.

The metaphor of the Loyal Soldier comes from the fate of certain Japanese soldiers, called Japanese Holdouts, or Stragglers for whom World War II did not end with Japan's surrender on September 2, 1945. These soldiers, living in isolated regions, continued to fight for years after the Axis defeat, some unaware, others refusing to believe, that the war was over. To avoid humiliating these loyal fighters, the Japanese honored them. Each one of us, Plotkin contends, has a Loyal Soldier in our employ who has faithfully protected us when it was necessary. But many of these old wars are history and, in order for us to move on, our entrenched servicemen need to be thanked, released, and assigned other duties.

Plotkin describes the first part of our life (youth and adolescence) as being appropriately dedicated to the assimilation of culture in accordance with community and family blueprints. This essential stage, where the Loyal Soldier often wins his first stripes, is dedicated to developing a healthy ego, but too frequently this is accomplished at the cost of misplacing the image with which we have been born.

The often neglected second stage of life (adulthood) requires a solo journey into the heart of our own darkness – a descent towards authenticity, towards soul, to reclaim what Joseph Campbell refers to as the “core” or “basic character of our being.” Plotkin quotes Robert Bly: “Our first twenty years are spent stuffing 90 percent of our wholeness into the ‘long black bag we drag behind us’ and the rest of our life attempting to retrieve those items.’”

However, reclaiming our shadow, those parts of ourselves we have repressed and disowned, is not the only work; we must return with a gift for our community, with the personal quality, or talent that is ours to develop. In order to achieve the Holy Grail, his soul’s quest, Parsifal, the Grail knight of Arthurian legend, needs to ask the ill Grail King two questions: “Lord, what ails thee?” and “Whom does the Grail serve?” With the first question we locate our sacred wound. With the second we discover our soul’s purpose in the world. The soul journey – unlike its opposite yet complementary passage, the spiritual journey – “calls us toward what is most unique in us.”

Plotkin clearly maps the three stages of the underworld journey. The first is severance which requires leaving the safety of home, surrendering control and predictability, and delving into the subconscious (“that which lies below awareness.”) The second stage, initiation, describes the transition from psychological adolescence to true adulthood. Of this long process Plotkin writes, “Most people learn about their soul image one clue at a time. The important thing is to say yes to each clue and thereby wend your way to the next clue until a pattern emerges.”

The recognition and incorporation (the return to our individual community with the gifts discovered on the way) is the final stage, but not the end of the road. The work is on-going. To quote the opening lines of Wislawa Szymborska’s “A Few Words on the Soul:”

We have a soul at times

No one’s got it non-stop,

for keeps.

Later in the poem Szymborska writes:

Joy and sorrow

aren’t two different feelings for it.

It attends us

only when the two are joined.

We can count on it

when we’re sure of nothing

and curious about everything

The aim of Soulcraft is to help the reader – more importantly the practitioner – to achieve this state of curiosity and paradox. The Soulcraft practices Plotkin outlines – and there are many – are designed to “evoke non-ordinary states of consciousness that reveal aspects of ourselves hidden from everyday awareness,” to walk along the equivocal edge. They include dreamwork, deep imagery, artwork, trance-drumming, trance-dancing, chanting, ceremonial sweat lodges, animal tracking, nature observation, talking across species boundaries, traditional ceremonies and rituals, as well as self-designed ceremonies. While several of these rites descend from ancient spiritual practices, Plotkin is at pains to point out that, “given that soul encounter is about authenticity it if it is about anything, it is best not to imitate another people or era.”

In a secular age there is much misunderstanding of ritual. It is often scorned, or embraced literally and dogmatically. As the playwright David Mamet contends, “The heresy of the Information Age is not even that reason will triumph, but that reason has triumphed.” In these rational times, ritual’s primary purpose, the physical enactment of the durative and transcendental, is misprized. For this reason some may roll their eyes at the many formal procedures Plotkin recommends as a means of stilling the mind, of engaging the body, allowing the something inside us that has no name, that is what we are, to surface. Yet, just as the conscious (rational) mind cannot create art, neither can the conscious mind contact soul.

Soulcraft is encyclopedic in its inclusion of practices, anecdotes, theory and references, and is as useful for the veteran quester as for the novice. Despite the occasional difficulty of expressing the numinous in everyday speech, Plotkin writes discerningly, taking on consequential issues in a fresh way. About the power of Talking Staff circles (ceremonial meetings during which the speaker holds a symbolic object), Plotkin writes, “If this sounds like more than one could hope for from a bunch of people sitting in a circle passing a stick, you probably haven’t yet experienced a council.” In the face of similar skepticism about the practice of Soulcraft, Plotkin would suggest that the doubter has not yet embarked on the dramatic journey into the mysteries of Nature and Psyche. Reading Soulcraft is a good place to start.

Wisdom’s Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition by Arthur Versluis. Published by State University of New York Press, 1999.

One of the great revolutions occurring unnoticed today is the field of spiritual history. The past half century has witnessed the progressive unveiling of a multitude of lineages, schools, and spiritual movements that were previously either systematically excluded by the dominant patriarchal — materialist paradigm or simply hidden and unknown because the evidence — the texts — were lost or unavailable. I am thinking of such phenomena as the work of feminist historians in uncovering the women mystics of the middle ages — Mechtild of Magdeburg, Mechtild of Hackeborn, Beatrice of Nazareth, Hadewich, Margaret of Porete, Gertrude the Great, Juliana of Cornichon and so on — whose presence radically revises our notion of Christianity; of Dame Frances Yates recovery of the importance of Hermeticism, Kabbala, and Rosicrucianism in the Renaissance; of the work of such as William Newman in uncovering the history of alchemy; of Henry Corbin's work in giving the world the riches of the Persian Theosophers of Light, the Ishraki; of the consequences of the discovery of the library of Nag Hammadi for our understanding of gnosticism and early Christianity; of the vast number of Mahayana Buddhist texts now available and commented on; of the discovery of such world philosophers as Nagarjuna, Ibn Arabi, Dogen. These are just examples; the list could go on. The point is that these things change our consciousness of who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.

Arthur Versluis' marvelous and accessible introduction to Protestant theosophic mysticism is a significant contribution to this ongoing process. Not only does he give us a valuable biographical history of the chief protagonists of this important movement of Sophianic spirituality most of whom are known only to a handful of specialists — figures like Jacob Boehme, Johann Georg Gichtel, John Pordage, Jane Leade, Dionysius Andreas Freher, William Law, Johannes Kelpius and Christopher Walton — but he also situates them theosophically, cosmologically, and theologically. Versluis' book is thus part history, part philosophy. The history is fascinating, anecdotal, outrageous — these theosophers lived according to the conventions of heaven, not of earth. Its is also extremely interesting, especially to Americans, for there is a deep strain of theosophic mysticism embedded in American spirituality. From this point of view, the chapter on “Johannes Kelpius and Pennsylvania Theosophy” is worth the price of admission alone. The heart of the book, however, lies in Versluis' account of the foundational theosophical teachings and the approach to sacred or “hiero-” history implicit in it. He explicates the principal doctrines — the Divine Nature, the Emanation of Worlds, the Fall, Spiritual Regeneration, and Angelology and Paradise — from an understanding situated within the mystical universe itself. Here Jane Leade's notion of “the college of the magi” is particularly revealing. Namely, on December 15, 1678, Mrs. Leade was “cast into as into a trance and had all outward senses drowned, and was brought by the Spirit into such a place that was as the scene of another world.” This place was the “Magic-School” — or “theosophic college” — which exists in a realm as clear as crystal, inhabited by angelic beings with “clarified” bodies. It is above time and space and is entered, as Versluis explains, by going into the “Watchtower of the silent Mind.” It is like a 'Holy Island' beyond the 'Coast' of this world. Entering it, one understands magically and is taught the “new Science” of the “Angelical philosophy.” From this “Wisdom School” or “High and Celestial University” all theosophers in some sense have drawn and may still draw, since it is an ever-present reality. Without making any claims beyond those permitted by scholarship, Versluis nevertheless inspired in this reader the hope that the College of the Magi might teach us all still, if we would only bend ourselves in its direction.

Consuming Desires: Culture, Consumption and the Pursuit of Happiness. Edited by Roger Rosenblatt. Published by Island Books.

At a time when the power of consumerism drives not only the American but also the global economy, this is a timely and valuable book. Roger Rosenblatt, best known for his commentary for The Newshour on PBS, has compiled a stimulating and varied series of essays by mostly well-known writers like William Greider and Bill McKibben who ponder questions of serious contemporary relevance. From where does this rapacious appetite for more spring? And what is the predicament it leaves us in today when the environmental consequences of our unrelenting obsessions with buying and having are increasingly apparent?

The overwhelming picture that emerges is of an economic and psychological system that is increasingly running out of control — an express train without a driver — with few individuals awake or influential enough to throw the brakes. A report by Andre Schiffrin from inside the publishing industry, a place close to the heart of American culture, reveals the increasingly disturbing prevalence of market values as multi-nationals intent only on the bottom line reduce both the number of titles critical of prevailing assumptions and new translations of foreign authors. In the world of television, we see the disturbing development of news divisions at the major networks viewed increasingly by their owners as mere profit centers along with the soap operas and sitcoms, rather than matters of public responsibility.

Where is all this leading? Perhaps David Orr sums it all up with arguably the most comprehensive sentence yet constructed on our present economic plight. Examining a beautiful, hand-carved wooden letter opener that he has used with pleasure for twenty years he remarks that the friend who made it for him, had he operated in accordance with conventional economic laws of self-interest, would have “hurried to a discount office supply store to buy one of the cheap, chrome-plated metal letter openers stamped out by the tens of thousands in some “developing” country by underpaid and overworked laborers employed by a multinational corporation using materials carelessly ripped from the earth by another footloose conglomerate and shipped across the ocean in a freighter spewing Saudi crude every which way and sold by nameless employers to anonymous consumers in a shopping mall built on what was prime farmland and is now uglier than sin itself, making a few dollars for some organization that buys influence in Washington and seduces the public on television.”

Hardly a pleasing prospect, but difficult to dispute. Juliet Schorr compounds our causes for concern by pointing out that Americans now spend roughly forty per cent of our free time watching TV and base our consumer expectations on the lifestyles of the upper middle class and rich, disproportionately portrayed with their tennis courts, private planes, convertibles, car phones, maids and swimming pools. And Alex Kotlowitz, in a sharply observed essay, notes that inner city kids want clothes with status-conferring, upscale brands like Tommy Hilfiger while, ironically, suburban white youths cultivate the edgy, prison-derived look of low-slung, baggy pants. Everyone, it seems, wants desperately to appear other than they really are.

Why? Edward Luttwak’s answer is the loneliness and alienation of American society where, deprived of the warm cocoon of extended families and often barely familiar with our neighbors, we exist in an atomistic world in which we become increasingly vulnerable to the siren call of consumerism as solace for all our pangs of loneliness.

Is all this a vicious circle with no way out? William Greider suggests not, when he says that the next big breakthrough we need must be in changing economics itself. Every day the ubiquitous business reports thoughout the media with their constant triumphalist cheerleading perpetrate a dangerous illusion: that there are no real environmental costs of industrial development. And so we are led to fantasies of limitless growth while the planet’s finite resources are continually depleted. We need instead a new economics, one that pays attention to the real world of nature, “in which growth once again becomes synonymous with genuine progress.”

Of course for some like Bharati Mukherjee, an immigrant from India, shopping mall culture at its most crass is a welcome relief from the endless round of familial responsibilities, cooking and cleaning that characterize a woman’s lot in traditional Indian culture. But for most of us our obsession with consumerism has become a kind of pathology that we are eagerly exporting to the whole world rather than examining for its flaws. The publication of this penetrating and entertaining collection of essays is a hopeful sign that the overdue debate on globalized consumerism, its causes and cure, is at last underway in mainstream circles. And not a moment too soon. Rosenblatt concludes his thoughtful introduction with the growing suspicion that the impulse that underlies our increasingly manic behavior is in fact a yearning for less, not more. And we can only hope that he is right. This deeply relevant book implies that our most sensible priorities should be voluntary simplicity and ecological economics. Combined with a search for meaning that inclines us to the spiritual rather than the material, they have the potential to begin to haul us out of this self-created mess before we consume our own souls along with most of the planet’s resources.

Martín Prechtel, Long Life, Honey in the Heart: A Story of Initiation and Eloquence from the Shores of a Mayan Lake, Tarcher Putnam, 1999, 384 pages, $25.95

“Copal smoke from several billowing burners choked the murky darkness. As my eyes adjusted to the crowded hall, it was evident that I stood surrounded on four sides by beings greater than myself

To my right, behind hundreds of shimmering, dripping, smoking tallow candies, stood a row of life-size sixteenth century Spanish Catholic saints dressed as Atitecos, and Mayanized beyond the conquerors’ imagination. These were accompanied by the householder's personal spirits and “throne beings,” and two rawhide boxes full of sacred ropes, obsidian blades, and spines….

Directly facing me, extending down the south wall, over three hundred old eyes stared at me out of the heads of more than one hundred fifty official men in black tailored wool blanket tunics with unused sleeves, their luxurious red headcloths tied up pirate fashion or loosely draped over their shoulders. When I said my meek little greeting, “Ex kola nuta nutie?” the whole room thundered with replies of various degrees depending on rank, gender, age, and relation to my lack of age and knowledge.”

Prechtel survived this confrontation when the old men and women realized that he was an amateur, and that he meant no harm. He was ordered to replace the old ceremonial flute player, dead for a year. The flute player's widow taught him hundreds of tunes and rhythms, so he became a hard worker in ceremonial duties.

Years later the same religious hierarchy asked him to become chief of a last initiation for young boys, even though the government had basically declared it illegal. The book gives a staggeringly detailed and moving version of that particular initiation. Prechtel cannot tell all that occurred, because some parts were and remain secret, but in what he was allowed to tell, he provides a flavorful description of the contemporary version of initiation that hundreds of cultures all over the globe once provided for their youth. The 12 year-old whose footprint was recently found in the mud of a Magdalenian cave may have been on his way to such an initiation. In an appendix to the book, Prechtel comments on the contemporary fad for initiation:

“To have initiations again we'd have to find a way to bring this banished indigenous soul back home to us and we would have to have communities worth coming home to. To do so we have to go very, very slowly. A great deal of study, struggle, sacrifice, and love would have to be expected to make a real initiation for modern folk, one that wouldn't ring hollow….

The main difference between the cultures who send their youth to war or corporations and the culture of a Mayan village lay in the fact that the village elders did not send their youth off to war armed with computers, swords, rocket launchers or tanks to kill and raid, creating more Death. Very significantly, they sent their Rainwarriors to fight against the Deity of Death, to fight Death itself, not to make more death but to coax Death into releasing life back to us….

Armed with an acute oral literacy of courting, poetry, history, and above all a well-developed relationship with nature as a divine female being, these “spiritual warriors” attempted to fight Death, to convince Death to release the Female principle of the Universe, the Woman Earth, as well as the boy's very own soul, which was a Female too; his ‘Spirit Bride.’”

Martín Prechtel’s first book, which was called Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, told the story of his personal apprenticeship to the old shaman and renegade Nicolas Chiviliu. I thought it a marvelous book, making clear how dangerous such shamanic work is, a long way from the current drum-beating in the basement of a church during the weekend. The new book is a treasure of cultural reporting, a testimony to the delight of being human, and an exhilarating account of a genuine initiation that took place only a few years ago. Because of Martín Prechtel's immersion in the village life of Santiago Atitlán — not as an observer, but as a Mayan-speaking participant, even a leader in their initiations — we have a new look at a human community as it goes toward infinite labor in order to honor the divine beings of ripening fruit, of fish, of jaguars, of lakes, and of the flowering earth.